Many people living in Mwanza, Tanzania, provision themselves through urban agriculture—the planting of crops and raising of animals in urban and peri-urban areas, as well as in the countryside. This article compares Mwanza's urban farmers with those in Kenya, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Ghana. Like Zimbabwe's urban agriculturalists, more and more of Mwanza's are not among the poorest of the poor. Much like Ghana's urban farmers, those in Mwanza are often middle and upper-class males with access to scarce land and inputs. Urban cultivators in Mwanza differ from those in Kenya and Zambia with regard to gender, socio-economic class and the factors motivating their farming activities. These findings suggest that even though socio-economic differentiation is on the increase in Tanzania it has not reached the levels of divergence found in Kenya and Zambia. Many of Mwanza's wealthier males continue to face enough job/income insecurity to choose to plant crops to support themselves and their household in lean times. They may also engage in urban agriculture because they are unable or unwilling to take advantage of more profitable investment opportunities outside the food market, or because they desire to spread risk across a number of different investments.

In the literature on pastoralist groups and the state, nomads are usually seen as increasingly marginalised today, whereas in the past nomads have often been described as ‘state builders’. But one interesting, if atypical, case has been overlooked: how a contemporary group of nomads, though they did not create a state, nonetheless came to conquer and dominate an existing one. The article starts by describing how the Tubu of Chad established dominance over the central government in the late 1970s and early 1980s. An evaluation is then made of the consequences this take-over of the Chadian state had for Tubu society. Admittedly the date for this evaluation are rather cursory and tentative, but it is possible to identify certain tendencies.

This study deals with the cultural construction of the forest by focusing on a group of farmers in Burkina Faso. It explores forest perceptions among Lyela farmers living in the vicinity of the Tiogo Forest Reserve through an analysis of cultural notions, specific historical circumstances and daily practices. Forest discourses articulate the process by which people's perceptions of forest resources are shaped both by religious and cultural notions of how to behave towards spirits, ancestors and human beings, on the one hand, and by sociopolitical and economic practices of how to make a living on the other. In search of nyo—that is, food, new farmland and a better living—people handle at least three layers of apparently contradictory conceptions of the forest. First, they follow the way of the ancestors according to which the Earth is sacred. Second, they cope with the legacy of colonial and post-colonial state administrations and particularly the Forestry Office. Third, they deal with market demands and the making of money by cotton cropping and woodcutting. The study concludes that these different layers of perception need to be understood as part of a present-day social struggle in which the Lyela farmers are engaged.